Gail Elliot, Ph.D.
and
Michael H. Halbert
BRUNNER/MAZEL Publishers New York
Foundations: Leaps, Halos, and Bitterness Difficulties with Traditional Tests and Tools Aggregating Information in the Absence of Weighting Criteria Adversarial Bitterness An Apology to Mark Twain A Word on the Statistics Employed Chapter One Loving the Courtroom Science in Court The Mental Health Professional in Court The Mental Health Professional in Custody Evaluations Suggested Solutions for Custody Evaluation Practice Dilemmas Chapter Two Postdivorce Issues: Relevant Research (with Gail Elliot) Effects of Divorce on Children Age/Developmental Status Sex or Gender Effects Interparental Conflict Parental Adjustment Custody Dispositions Resilience (Favorable Outcomes) Preexisting Conditions (Prospective Studies) Methodological and Conceptual Issues Chapter Three Congruent Communications: The Vital Roles of Symbol Systems and Information Processing Strategies What Are Special Targets for the Custody Evaluator? Interviews, Observations, and Traditional Tests Marital Communication Symbol Systems Information-Processing Strategies Critical Conceptual Targets: Measurement Approaches Summary Chapter Four Bricklin Perceptual Scales (BPS): Child-Perception-of-Parents Series Custody Decision-Making: Vital Test Properties An Overview of the BPS The BPS Groupings: Competency, Supportiveness, Consistency, and Possession of Admirable Traits BPS Data and the Selection of Primary-Caretaking Parent (PCP) Chapter Five The Perception-of-Relationship Test (PORT) An Overview of the PORT A Drawing-Based Projective Test The Detection of Physical and Sexual Abuse with the PORT Development of the PORT and Validation Chapter Six The Parent Awareness Skills Survey (PASS) Chapter Seven The Parent Perception of Child Profile (PPCP) Chapter Eight Getting Accurate Information Confusing Sources of Influence in a Custody Evaluation The Not-Based-on-Actual-Interaction Scenarios: Alienation Strategies Maximizing Accurate Data The Special Problem of Collateral-Source Data Chapter Nine Areas of Assessment Targets for Assessment Gathering the Data Parent-Child Dyads or Family "Systems"? Chapter Ten Creating a Custody Plan: Aggregating and Weighting the Variables (with Michael H. Halbert) Choosing a PCP: A Decision-Tree Model Using BPS and PORT (a Child-Derived) Data The Contribution of Formal Models Model Number One: Mainly Intuition Model Number Two: Weighted Averages Model Number Three: Modified Bayesian Our Suggestions in Actual Use The Sequence of Steps in Setting Up and Conducting a Comprehensive Custody Evaluation Chapter Eleven Communicating the Results of a Custody Evaluation Selected Goals of a Custody Evaluation Nonadversarial Communication Evolution, Living in the Wild, the Fight-Flight Response, and the Science and Skills of No-End-Point Negotiation The Custody Evaluation Report An Outline for a Comprehensive Custody Evaluation Chapter Twelve Validity and Reliability Issues Chapter Thirteen Dilemmas in Child Custody Evaluations How Important are Grandparents? Why Not Mediation Instead of Evaluation? Allegations of Sexual Abuse The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Nightmare After the Evaluation: Monitoring Plans and Resource Facilitations When Are Data Stale? Does Child-Derived Data Change According to Who Brings the Child to the Evaluation? Who Has the Right to Seek an Evaluation, How Much Data Does One Need, and What Kind of Proof of Accuracy Does One Need in a Courtroom? Cutting Costs in Custody Evaluations Walking the Line with Attorneys Why Not Just Ask the Children? Testifying in Court Test Security Versus Due Process Splitting up Siblings Saving Time and Aggravation Homosexuality in Custody Dispute Resolution The Nitty-Gritty Details of a Custody Plan What Should the Custody Evaluator Bring to the Courtroom? What About Hostile Judges? How Does One Match Up Parents and Children without Tests? Mixed Messages from the Unconscious Mind Custody Evaluations: A Peek into the Future
References
Name Index
Subject Index
Barry Bricklin, Ph.D., President of Bricklin Associates, oversees a large clinical practice focusing on custody assessment issues. Dr. Bricklin is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Widener University, Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology and has served on the faculties of Jefferson Medical College and Hahnemann University. He is past president of the Philadelphia Society for Clinical Psychologists and the Philadelphia Society for Projective Assessment. Dr. Bricklin, with world famous psychologist Zygmunt A. Piotrowski, created the first scoring system for the Hand Test and has written several papers on the prognosis of schizophrenia. He is the author of several books and many articles.
Dr. Bricklin is the Executive Chair of the Professional Academy of Custody Evaluators, creator of the first data-based research-derived custody instruments, and Editor of the Custody Newsletter.
Gail Elliot, Ph.D. is Head, Child Development and Family Processes Research, Bricklin Associates, Vice Chair of the Professional Academy of Custody Evaluators, and a psychologist in private practice. She is coauthor of the Parent Perception of Child Profile (PPCP), a widely used custody evaluation instrument, and is responsible for much of the research behind Bricklin custody instruments. Dr. Elliot is coauthor with Barry Bricklin of ACCESS (A Comprehensive Custody Evaluation Standard System).
Michael H. Halbert is a management consultant who specializes in the application of philosophical and scientific approaches to complex, real problems and renders them more tractable to the people who have to solve them. His expertise has been utilized by General Mills, the World Bank, and the United States Secret Service. Mike Halbert has taught operations research, statistics, and marketing at several graduate schools, including Case Western Reserve, Harvard Business School, and the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania).
Three of the most challenging problems in the custody evaluation field follow from: (1) the difficulties involved in adapting data derived from group studies and/or traditional psychological tests into forms that can be used in individual cases; (2) the absence of clear and compelling guidelines to aggregate the mountains of information collected in the course of a comprehensive evaluation; and (3) the bitter adversarial attitudes among custody disputants, which disincline them to cooperate in forging and maintaining any custody plan.
Whether one seeks help in deciding what to measure in a custody evaluation from written legal criteria (e.g., the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act; see Sales, Manber, & Rohman, 1992) or from the world of clinical experience, the above challenges remain.
Simple solutions have not been found. The hope that one particular custody disposition, such as joint custody, same-sex custody, etc., would prove universally superior to competing arrangements has not been realized. As one very knowledgeable researcher put it, ".. there is no single best arrangement for all children..." (Bray 1991, p.420).
In the pages to follow, we will address these challenges. In so doing, we will describe some concepts our research teams have found to be very helpful in understanding parent-child interactions (symbol systems and information processing strategies). The issue of getting untainted data from children who, in the midst of custody disputes, are being coached, threatened, bribed, and subjected to loyalty conflicts, will be addressed. We will spell out what our various teams have come to see as the essential targets of a truly comprehensive evaluation. As editor of the Custody Newsletter, I hear about specific custody dilemmas (e.g., allegations of abuse) from evaluators all over the country. Suggestions will be offered.
I am frequently asked how I use the tools we have developed interactively as a set. Chapter Ten addresses this issue.
Finally, the evaluator must learn to feel comfortable in court, where he or she will often have to present evaluation information to an audience that, in part, will be composed of a nasty inquisitor, possibly a bored, hostile, or intimidating person in a black robe, and at least one person who used to like the evaluator and now considers him or her a total betrayer.
This group of challenges for the evaluator follows from the fact that the typical tools and tests in the mental health professional's armamentarium-procedures that are so good at measuring cognitive capacities and identifying sources of conflict and underlying personality variables-are not data-based to yield information that is maximally helpful in custody cases.
In the approach spelled out in this book, a good bit of emphasis is placed on obtaining measurements from the involved children. This follows from the fact that we are far more interested in attempting to determine the actual impact a parent is having on a child than we are in what a parent may or may not be doing. It is certainly not that we have no interest in what parents do; this body of information comprises a very important part of a comprehensive custody evaluation. But without knowing the effects of these behaviors on a child, the aforementioned data have little informational value to a custody decision-maker. In fact, it may be correct to say that just as in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics in which there is nothing "really out there" independent of the design of some particular experiment or observational mechanism, that is no "parental behavior" independent of its impact on a given child at a particular time.
We were heavily influenced in coming to this approach by observations we made during research carried out in the early 1960's, while developing the Perception-of-Relationships Test or PORT. One observation was how frequently what a child was taking as the "meaning" of a given parent's communications seemed to all observers pretty much unrelated to what the parent was intending to communicate.
Over the years, we have been influenced by similar conceptual approaches. One is the "utilization" model of Milton Erickson. Translated into our purposes, this model suggests that a child's ability to utilize parental behavior is a more salient piece of information to a custody evaluator than is the meaning or label the evaluator might assign to the parental behavior.
These ideas are also similar to those proposed by Thomas, Chess, and Birch (1968) with their goodness-of-fit assessment of parent-child interactions.
We have also been influenced by the important statement by Bandler and Grinder (1979) that the meaning of a communication is the response it elicits, regardless of the intentions of the sender (see also Dilts, 1983, p.14).
Likewise, these ideas have been shaped by the importance of utilizing feedback information in fashioning truly effective and congruent communications, as spelled out by McMaster and grinder (1980).
The approach has much in common, overall, with the justly famous analysis of legal competencies proposed by Grisso (1986). Our tools, collectively, reflect a "function" (what a given parent knows, believes, and can do), a "context" (the setting in which this function is relevant, e.g., offering homework advice, modeling the skills of competency, etc.), a "causal" implication (the tools used to assess parents can help to explain what is found in those which reflect the impact of parental behavior on a child), an "interactive" component (the tests measure the utilizability of that which is offered by a parent), and can offer a judgmental and/or dispositional element (e.g., a recommendation for primary custodial or caretaking parent, abbreviated PCP). But beware regarding the latter item. This is an "ultimate issue" piece of information (a recommendation for PCP) and must be addressed quite carefully. More on this in Chapter One.
There is another, as yet unmentioned advantage to utilizing a test-based approach for custody decision-making. It is my contention that the tool most widely used around the country and probably the world in custody decision-making is the interview. Someone once told Winston Churchill that a person he did not hold in high regard at least had the redeeming virtue of being "modest". Replied Winston: "Indeed, he has much to be modest about."
I feel similarly toward the interview.
I believe the interview, important as it is, serves as an iatrogenic force in the custody evaluation procedure. Yes, we must interview people, we must learn their wants, worries, and concerns, and what they think. Indeed, all of their worries and concerns must be carefully and individually addressed in the final report. However, in dutifully paying heed to and writing down all of the horror stories that each parent has to tell about the other, we are also showing, by the attention we pay to them, that yes indeed, this is the way to "win" a custody battle. For this is exactly what the typical custody disputant thinks: The way to prevail in a custody battle is to have lots of bad stories to tell about the hated opponent. By dutifully responding to and writing down all of these things, we are simply encouraging each disputant to go out and find (create?) more of the same.
This is what I call the "negative incident model" in custody decision-making. It is a model that leads each parent to believe safety resides in compiling a long list of terrible things to say about the other parent.
It is my thesis that the negative incident model not only encourages, but in many ways, by virtue of the self-fulfilling prophecy, co-creates the so-called parent alienation syndrome, a scenario (covered in later chapters) in which one parent deliberately sets out to alienate a child from the other parent. I am indeed mindful of the fact that most parents caught up in custody disputes may have hated each other before the custody battles began. It is also obvious that the legal system itself, in spite of any "procedural fairness" perceived by the participants, co-creates a "fault model" in a custody dispute by allowing (and hence encouraging) one participant to prevail over the other by means of proving "unfitness," e.g., adultery, drug abuse, mental illness, etc. (Rohman, Sales, & Lou, 1987, p. 86). Nevertheless, any clinical process that contributes heavily to a parent's believing that the way to predominate in a custody situation is to collect negative incidents is not really helpful.
With a test-based approach, the evaluator sends a different message. Essentially, the custody evaluator within this approach is saying to an involved parent that although I will listen to your concerns and worries, and indeed will address them, I am far more interested in measuring how successful you are at being a parent than I am in hearing negative stories about your opponent. The subtle message is this: If you want to prevail in a custody dispute, spend a lot more time thinking about how to be a better parent and a lot less time creating bad things to say about your opposition.
How this orientation is actually implemented will be covered in many of the following chapters, since I am certainly aware that one cannot conduct a comprehensive custody evaluation without using the interview.
While some states spell out what a custody evaluator should take into consideration in attempting to determine which disposition and/or which of two competing parties can better serve in a child's best interests - as does the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (1979) - none offer clear guidelines on how to aggregate the resulting information to yield one message - that the mother/father is the better of the two candidates for PCP (primary custodial or caretaking parent). Some states do make the a priori assumption that joint custody is the best custody disposition unless there exists important information to the contrary.
The Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act directs the court to consider "all relevant factors," including: the wishes of the child's parent or parents as to proper custody; the wishes of the child; the interactions and interrelationships between the child with the parents and other significant persons; the child's adjustment at home, school, and in the community; and the mental and physical health of all the individuals concerned. It also mandates that the court should not consider parental behaviors that do not have any effects on the child.
The document does not, however, tell the evaluator or decision-maker how to prioritize the information it directs to be gathered.
It is the rule, not the exception, for the custody evaluator to end up, in the wake of a comprehensive evaluation, with a file six inches thick, consisting of the originals and/or copies of documents, the results of tests and observations, questionnaire responses, and transcripts of interviews with a literal parade of people, including each of the competing party's friends, relatives, and baby-sitters, each having stepped forward to champion his or her choice.
And now the custody evaluator stares at this horrendously high pile of papers and wonders not only if he or she has gotten credible measurements of all of the variables involved, but also how in the world to assign some kind of "importance" rating to each of the findings. How does one assign differential "weightings," in terms of "meaningfulness to the child," to such things as: parental physical health; the neighborhood a child would live in under competing arrangements; parental time availability; parental ability to furnish appropriate baby-sitters, parental financial status; etc.
With no firm criteria, Rashomon.
There is the creepy feeling that 10 different people could look at the information and come up with 10 different time-sharing plans, each person finding something different to label "really important."
I have traveled the country offering workshops in comprehensive custody evaluations where I had extended opportunities to talk to savvy participants. As editor of the Custody Newsletter, I speak via telephone daily to custody evaluators around the country and the world. I have spoken formally and informally with fellow evaluators both in their professional offices and, with each of us nervously catching "breathers," in the corridors of courthouses during breaks in trials.
What I hear sometimes makes me feel terrific, even if my companion evaluator is on a different side of the fence than I: articulate, thoughtful, well reasoned assertions. But often - alas, too frequently - I am not so thrilled.
Lacking ways to meaningfully aggregate data, the evaluator moves all to easily in the direction of subjective biases. Here are some reasons given to me as the controlling aspects in certain cases, the items seen by the involved evaluators as the most important pieces of information gathered.
"She smoked a lot of dope during the seventies."
"He's so rich, he's a real snob. I believe he thinks he can buy whatever he wants."
"You should have seen all the oral themes in her Rorschach!" (The conclusion was that the mother would be "smothering".)
Some of these evaluators had the - shall we call it - "courage" to actually say these things out loud in courtrooms as the controlling reasons for their recommending a certain parent for primary custodial parent.
A bigger fear of mine centers on cases where the evaluators do not spell out how they have assigned importance to the various assessed elements. The great majority of subjective biases operate subtly. It is likely that many evaluators do not even consciously realize how they have assigned significance to the items they have selected to assess. And the much vaunted, supposedly remedial, cry by some organizations that only neutral "bilateral" evaluators to be utilized in conducting evaluations does nothing whatsoever to protect against the operation of such biases.
Part of the problem here is the same as that which underlies the importance of an expert witness's not giving ultimate issue testimony. That is, there is no way within our legal system that science alone can decide what is the "best" outcome. For example, one judge may consider a miserably unhappy, highly achieving child to represent an outcome vastly superior to one exemplified by a contented underachiever; the judge in the next courtroom may find the reverse. (This dilemma will be covered in greater detail in Chapter One.)
The solution we will suggest for dealing with mountains of disparate data involves the use of models by means of which one can aggregate the information collected during the course of a comprehensive evaluation. One data-based decision-tree model will be offered, one informal model, and two formal ones.
One advantage of such models is that each allows the custody evaluator (and anyone who would review his or her decision-making) to explicitly review the decision-making process.
Each further allows the custody evaluator to take an explicit look at how he or she has assigned credibility and relevance (or probative value) estimates to each piece of evidence gathered.
The formal models dampen any unwanted halo effect.
The models contribute toward confining errors in the decision-making strategy to that part of the process the typical mental health clinician does best: the eliciting of information. The process of "putting the pieces together" is done formally. While some experienced evaluators believe human beings are particularly gifted in doing this "intuitively," available evidence is not wildly supportive of this belief (see e.g., Schum & Martin, 1982, pp. 104-151).
Perhaps most important, and this is an advantage that will be seen more clearly after a reading of Chapter One, the use of a model helps to create a subtle mind-set shift in the evaluator that I believe is beneficial for anyone who would serve as an expert witness.
Without realizing it, too many expert witnesses approach their tasks with the mind-set of a judge rather than of a scientist. Stated more precisely, the use of a formal model shifts the mental health professional's mind-set away from asking this kind of questions: "Given the evidence, what is the probability that the mother/father is the better bet for PCP?" Instead, the professional with a scientist's mind-set approaches each piece of evidence by asking: "Assuming a hypothesis is true, what is the probability that I would find this particular piece of evidence?"
Suppose, in the course of conducting a comprehensive evaluation, it is ascertained that when it comes to school conferences, the mother attends 70 percent of the time and the father 50 percent. In too many instances, the evaluator decides how much value or how many "goodie points" to assign each state of affairs (each attendance record). He or she might think that the person who attends 70 percent of the school conferences deserves to be the primary custodial parent more than the person who comes 50 percent of the time. This kind of thinking involves putting oneself in a judge's role, literally saying what should or ought to be true.
A more scientific approach would be for the evaluator to frame two important questions. The first one would be : "In similar custody cases of which I have knowledge where the mothers were the better choice for primary custodial parent, what is the probability that I would find this particular piece of evidence (the mother attends 70 percent of the time, the father 50 percent of the time)?"
The second one would be: "In similar custody cases of which I have knowledge where the fathers were the better choice for primary custodial parent, what is the probability that I would find this same piece of evidence (the mother comes 70 percent of the time, the father 50 percent of the time)?"
By framing it this way, the custody evaluator is far more likely to either seek a published database or go into his or her internal storehouse of memories and experiences, in an attempt to ascertain the probabilities of finding such evidence under the two sets of conditions. Hence, the approach may remind the evaluator that the probability of a father attending school conferences less often than the mother occurs with equal frequency in both sets of
conditions (where the mothers have been the better PCPs and where fathers have been the better PCPs within "traditional" marriages where mothers were homemakers and fathers often worked a significant distance away from home ) and hence has no real ability to discriminate between these two conditions (i.e., is not really a piece of information with probative value). The critical question for the evaluator is in a comparison of the probabilities with which the evidence would occur under two competing hypotheses - i.e., the degree to which the evidence (the 70/50 mother versus father attendance records within traditional marriages where the fathers work far away from home) truly differentiates suitable from non-suitable custodial parents. More about this in Chapter Ten.
There are three sources of the adversarial anger and bitterness many custody disputants experience. (Remember that we are dealing with a highly selective part of the population when we speak of the need for evaluations. The estimated number of divorcing parents who end up in a custody dispute in which testimony may be required from an expert witness range from about two percent of all divorcing parents (Hoppe, 1993) to about 10 percent (Melton, Petrila, Poythress, & Slobogin, 1987, p.g 329). The thrusts and counterthrusts that result from this adversarial anger and bitterness impeded resolution of the disputes. In Chapter Eleven, we will offer information the custody evaluator can use to make a contribution in this area, without blurring any critical professional role boundaries.
One source of angry, adversarial attitudes would best be explained by individual characteristics of the involved disputants. Hoppe (1993) studies a group of custody/visitation litigants and identified personality traits he believes predispose them to suffer "relationship disorders" (see Chapter Thirteen).
Another source of adversarial bitterness is best explained by qualities of a specific dyadic relationship. Within concepts developed in Chapter Three, we see such parents - those who seem to go on arguing into eternity - as having incompatible symbol systems and information-processing strategies.
A third source of adversarial bitterness stems from aspects of the legal/evaluative process itself.
In subsequent chapters, we will present evidence that while some procedural aspects of the legal system (those that provide a disciplined forum in which each participant can put his or her best foot forward in front of what is perceived as a "fair" judge) are actually helpful, other aspects are decidedly not helpful, e.g., unrealistic standards and/or whimsical, unscientific rulings. In one case in which I participated, a father was denied unsupervised visitation with a child because he was labeled by the mother and her friends as suffering form "alcoholism," an idea bought by the judge. No real definition of "alcoholism" was given. He was an "alcoholic" because, although he rarely had more than one drink a day, "he needed" that drink. Never mind that no operational procedure was advanced by means of which one could tell the difference between a person "needing" to do some particular thing as opposed to "choosing" to do this same thing. More importantly, no evidence was offered that this "alcoholic condition" was having any negative effect whatsoever on the involved child.
Standards or rulings that result in arbitrarily limiting a parent's access to a child will, of course, raise the level of adversarial bitterness.
Other qualities of the legal/evaluative system that contribute to the bitterness harbored by the parents would include: exorbitant attorney fees; the long waits (continuances) between hearings (eating away at people who already feel desperate); overly aggressive attorney attitudes both in and out of the courtroom, along with totally blind client-loyalty; the know-it-all demeanors of some judges; the coercive threat of further lawsuits as a bargaining chip; and, as mentioned, an overreliance on the interview by mental health professionals. This last attitude perpetuates and fuels the negative incident model, which in turn co-creates the need for each parent to "discover" situations in which the other parent is "wrong."
We are going to propose a specific system (in Chapter Eleven) of nonadversary communication strategies that can be used and modeled in all inter-changes with the evaluation participants, and in the wording of all written reports.
Further, I almost always recommend the direct teaching of this approach to battling custody disputants. Negotiation, the flowing back and forth of information and energy fields, is a necessary and probably sufficient condition of health. This would apply regardless of the entity or entities in question - an individual within himself or herself, a dyad, a family, an organization, or a single cell and its environment. It is no accident that the firm comprehensive system of thinking that the Western World has known (Plato, 427-347 B.C.) was presented in the form of a back and forth dialogue, adversarial on the surface, yet characterized at a deeper level by the principles proposed later.
Please note well that the teaching of nonadversarial skills to highly argumentative, cantankerous, hostile parents is not a substitute for the offering of highly detailed recommendations. The more that remains open for hostile parents to argue about, the more the potential damage to the children.
An editor once asked me why I use the terms "we" and "us" when I write, as in "We found such and such to be true" or "We believe it best to do such and such."
She said: "Don't you really mean that you, personally, found such and such to be true? Shouldn't you use the word "I" in these sentences?"
Mark Twain once said the only people who may legitimately use the term "we" instead of "I" are members of a royal family and people with tapeworms.
Well, I am not a member of a royal family (a great family, but not a royal one) and so far as I know, harbor no intestinal visitors.
What I do harbor, however, is a profound sense of all the people in the various research teams of which I have been a member. And it is these people I have in mind when I write. They worked directly in forging the materials in this book.
Although I am not a psychoanalyst, Dr. Robert Waelder has had a profound effect on my approach to intellectual endeavors. He and I had frequent conversations while our data-based tests were being fine-tuned.
When I joined the faculty at Jefferson Medical College to work under Zygmunt A. Piotrowski, I had, on my first day, an encounter with what I call a classic or "continental" lunch (i.e., how one went about gaining an education on the "Continent," in pre World War II Europe). Dr. Piotrowski, over the course of a three hour meal, spoke of the naval history of World War II in the Pacific Theater, the psychology behind the techniques of various Renaissance artists and sculptors, problems in the developmental history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a good bit about Poland's relationships with the USSR (not terrific), Freud's theories of psychosexuality, Jacob Burckhardt's approach to art and history, and the correct way to drink tea.
I realized I would have to go back to school and study world history from the Sumerian peoples on, just to be able to survive lunch times. Needless to say, over the course of working together on many mutual research projects, I learned vastly more from Dr. Piotrowski than I had in earning in three of my degrees.
Mike Halbert, my coauthor of Chapter Ten, by encouraging me in the 1950's and 60's to become involved in the newly developing field of Operations Research (of which he was a pioneer), expanded enormously the mind-set tools I had acquired up to that time. He has remained my greatest mentor, although since there is not sufficient time to run all of my ideas past him, I accept responsibility for what is less than adequate about them.
Dr. Gail Elliot, head of Child Development and Family Systems, research for Bricklin Associates, coauthored Chapter Three in this book, as well as the Parent-Perception-of-Child-Profile. She contributed to the development of all Bricklin Associates tests ad tools.
A dictionary definition of the word "seminal" goes something like this: Having the character of an originative power or source; making a powerful contribution to the seeds of later development. This entry, in my personal dictionary, would simply read: Bruce D. Sales, J.D., Ph.D. A pioneer in law-psychology education, the holder of 67 honors and awards and author or coauthor of 11 books and 129 articles on law-psychology issues, Bruce Sales has not only contributed greatly to the field of custody decision-making directly, but has been personally supportive of our teams' endeavors in this field.
Dr. S. Richard Sauber was one of the first custody evaluators to fully grasp the importance of a utilization model in custody decision-making.
My daughter, Carol Bricklin, assisted tremendously in the preparation of this work.
I deliberately employ simple statistics whenever possible, e.g., percent of agreement. I have a practical reason for this, as well as a conceptual reason.
The practical reason is that these statistics must be readily understandable to parents, attorneys, and judges. This "ability to understand" is required in situations that are typically very tense and, too often, adversarial in nature. Keep in mind that at least one purpose in developing these tests and tools was to get the individuals caught up in custody disputes on to an approach that measures a parent's usefulness to a child and away from an approach that depends on counting up negative incidents. To do this, to get the involved parents on the track of seeking to be good parents and away from spying on the opposition, one must enable them to understand what the involved tests actually seek to do. This approach, the use of tests and tools that aim to explore how a parent can be maximally helpful to a child, must be explained to these parents at the earliest possible point of contact in a dispute process.
The second reason for choosing simple statistics is conceptual. I have some distrust for complicated statistical strategies (i.e., procedures that have complex assumptive structures). To use Piotrowski's words: "If you need complicated statistics to demonstrate relationships, you probably could have done a much better job of choosing and defining your concepts in the first place" (personal communication).
I am sure there are those who would disagree with this thought (as well as with other thoughts expressed in this book). I would like to quote Arthur S. Reber (1985) who, in the course of preparing a remarkably thoughtful and useful Dictionary of Psychology, had the following to say after struggling (successfully) to define an elusive concept: "(G)entle criticisms concerning specific failures . . . should be sent to the publisher or the author" (p. 181).
I ask the same: Please keep them gentle.
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